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main reference

Beatrice Potter was born in Gloucester, into a class which, to use her own words, “habitually gave orders.” She was the eighth daughter of Richard Potter, a businessman, at whose death she inherited a private income of £1,000 a year, and Laurencina Heyworth, daughter of a Liverpool merchant. She grew up a rather lonely and sickly girl, educating herself by extensive reading...

association with

Fabian Society

...Thomas Davidson, a Scottish philosopher, and its early members included George Bernard Shaw, Sidney Webb, Annie Besant, Edward Pease, and Graham Wallas. Shaw and Webb, later joined by Webb’s wife, Beatrice, were the outstanding leaders of the society for many years. In 1889 the society published its best-known tract,
Fabian Essays in Socialism, edited by Shaw. It was followed in 1952 by...

Spencer

...both “primitive” and “civilized.” The series was interrupted in 1881 because of a lack of public support. Spencer was a friend and adviser of Beatrice Potter, later
Beatrice Webb, the social reformer, who frequently visited Spencer during his last illness and left a sympathetic and sad record of his last years in
My Apprenticeship (1926). Spencer...

conflict with Wells

...the Fabian Society, though he soon began to criticize its methods. The bitter quarrel he precipitated by his unsuccessful attempt to wrest control of the Fabian Society from George Bernard Shaw and Sidney and
Beatrice Webb in 1906–07 is retold in his novel
The New Machiavelli (1911), in which the Webbs are parodied as the Baileys.

founding of “New Statesman”

political and literary weekly magazine published in London, probably England’s best-known political weekly, and one of the world’s leading journals of opinion. It was founded in 1913 by Sidney and
Beatrice Webb. He was a Fabian Socialist and she his political and literary partner, and their journal reflected their views, becoming an independent socialist forum for serious intellectual...

views on organizational relations

Later, around the turn of the century, British political economists Sidney and
Beatrice Webb joined this debate by arguing that a combination of worker and community forces would gradually achieve a socialist state. They shared with Marx a belief that workers and employers are separated by class interests and that only by organizing into trade unions would workers amass the bargaining power...

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